GST: Civilization Revolution Review

When gamers are strapped for cash but still want to shoot and loot things, they turn to Gamer Savings Time (GST) to get the skinny on forgotten bargain bin titles. With the impending release of Civilization V, lets take a look at the last Civ game to hit the market, Civilization Revolution.

Revolution isn’t your typical Civilization game. For starters, it not on the PC…at all. A version of it is available for the iPad, but I would hesitate to even call the iPad a computer. Civ Rev, is only available on consoles, mainly Xbox 360 and Ps3. Its the first console Civ game since the port of Civ 2 to the original Playstation. Unlike the aforementioned port though Civ Rev was built from the ground up for consoles, and it shows.

The player takes the role of the leader of a Civilization and must build it nurture it, and if you’re good, it will prosper. Anyone that has played any game in the series knows this. Many of the features and micro-management layers from the PC games have been stripped and the game concepts are laid out very clearly throughout. Obviously Sid Meier and his team are reaching out to the non-PC and non-strategy crowd with Revolution.

All actions are controlled with the standard controller and menus are simple enough to be easily navigated. Managing unit movement, city status and production, foreign affairs and scientific research have literally never been easier. The entire interface is intuitive and the button functions are clearly laid out on screen. It is very clear that ease of use and playability was a main focus during development. Many of the mainstays of a past civ games are missing with the most obvious one being an overhead map view.

There are 4 different ways to win your game. Economic (earn money), Cultural (make artsy crap), Scientific (the ever-popular space race), and Domination (Kill, Kill, Kill) victories are your options with Scientific being the easiest and Domination being the hardest. Your advisers keep you up to date as to where you stand on each goal regularly and nearly all things built in cities specifically target a certain types of victory. The easier the difficulty the more hand holding the advisers do.

With five different difficulty levels to play, the player can gradually increase the challenge brought upon them. The choice of Civilizations to command is deep and most of the technologies and units in the PC games, seamlessly make the transition to console. The visual characters themselves have always been extravagant, but characters like Napoleon, Catherine II, Cleopatra and Abraham Lincoln are almost too over the top. The foreign, economic military and science advisers, appear on screen too much. So much so that the characters are often seen pushing each other away to get screen time. The shenanigans of the visual cast are cute but get old pretty quickly. Luckily with a button press most of them can be skipped.

What can’t be skipped are the 5-15 sec long battle sequences. These are repetitive, and can slow the pace of a game down. Other than the mind numbing battle sequences, the game has a great pace and alot of character. It feels just like a Civ game and plays like 85% of a Civ game. I have to applaud Meier’s team for making a strong transition.

However there are a few things that could be improved. With a many different high resolution polygonal characters fighting for sometimes mere seconds of screen time, the frame-rate can get choppy, really choppy. Multiple times, I thought the game had stopped when a screen took 5 or more secs to load. A more robust options menu, would have been nice. I would have loved to turn off alot of the visual flare and focus on what was happening on the map. I really don’t need the Economic adviser to tell me to build the World Bank (to score an economic victory), every single turn. That too gets annoying, (especially when I am trying to get a scientific victory). Also, the basic game seems a bit too short to be a civ game.

As a kid, I remember my Civ 2 games literally taking months to complete. I would sink 60-80 hours into a game trying to kill the frenchys, or build a space ship, or successfully connect all of my cities via railroad, but I was able to knock out a full Civ Rev game in about 4-5 sittings of just a few hours. Sure, I expect this from scenarios that change aspects of the game, but the vanilla campaign should be epic in length. Who knows, maybe I’m just really good. What bothered me is that a few of my games ended without anyone winning. The games are only a set number of turns, with the game ending after the last one. Sure the game itself picked a winner, but I was given victories without meeting the criteria stated in the descriptions of the 4 types of victories. The game was done playing with me before I was done playing with it.

On the flip side, the scenarios are fun and a great way to knock out a quick and easy game of Civ in 30 minutes or less. If you are good enough, you can play and win the Lightning Round scenario in less than 10 minutes. Bite-size Civ is VERY intriguing.

If you have never played a Civ game and want to know what all the fuss is about, pick up Civilization Revolution, it will ease you into real time strategy nicely and prime you for the big boy PC/Mac versions of the game. If you are a huge Civ fan and have spent time with all of them in the series, you may want to wait for Civilization 5 as Revolution may not be deep enough for you.

Verdict: Dumbed Down, Yet Not Stupid